Salome Kammer is an artist who is able in her interpretations to exploit the entire spectrum of the human voice. She moves between styles of singing with the ease of an actress changing roles. Sometimes she is a jazz singer, sometimes an opera diva; she can sing in the traditional style of Broadway and then mesmerize with interpretations of Romantic lieder. In her performances of experimental compositions, she can explore unplumbed depths, balance her way through daring eruptions of feeling, or playfully parody the musical structures. She tells a story with her breath, with throat noises and rhythms; she warbles, murmurs, trills, grunts, bawls, whistles, shouts, vibrates, resonates, and sings. Salome Kammer is also at home in the world of traditional chanson; she is a master of both satirical and lyrical moods, and is equally able to explore the ironic pathos of Brecht and Weill as well as the melancholy of Alban Berg or the intimacy of an early Baroque lullaby by Tarquinio Merula. It is impossible to classify Salome Kammer's voice. She is a unique phenomenon, both in her vocal range and in her ability to coax the most unusual noises out of her throat. Salome Kammer: "When I began to take an interest in the vocal music of the twentieth century, I of course encountered the unforgettable singer Cathy Berberian (1928-1983), who was the muse of so many composers in the 1950s and 60s. She also had no qualms about using all possible musical styles, and her courage and her readiness to cross borders changed the direction of musical history. It is to her that we owe a masterpiece like Luciano Berio's 'Sequenza III', which I sing here as an homage to Berberian. Numerous vocal colors and sounds were notated in this piece for the first time, in a very simple yet exact manner."

Pieces are like seismographs says Adriana H�lszky about her own work - but it could well be applied to all the works recorded on the present CD: Music as a seismograph for a composer's aesthetic premises, musical ideas, and the circumstances of composition or, beyond the period of composition, to provide information about the approaches that musicians and listeners, respectively, adopt toward it, about our changing understanding of music. The combination of works recorded here by Julius Berger and Stefan Hussong demonstrates that for all the historicism of our musical life, the most recent music and older music do not contradict each other, but instead the perspective and experiences provided by the most recent music can provide surprising approaches to older music.

Music is calligraphy using sounds painted on the canvas of silence. Toshio Hosokawa's idea demonstrates his engagement with Far Eastern calligraphy as the most prominent connection between his compositional esthetic and traditional Japanese arts as well as the principles of Asian philosophy. There is not a single note in the music of this Japanese composer that is not continuously modified like a brushstroke - every sound seems to be the result of inexorable change embedded in cyclic processes of birth and decay. Whereas constant oscillation is typical of "Landscape II", "Landscape V" is one of Hosokawa's most peaceful and static pieces. It was influenced by Mark Rothko's monochromatic color field paintings, where a relationship is created between two nearly identical colors. Here the string quartet and the Japanese mouth organ sho seem to merge to become an oscillating instrument. Hosokawa composed "Elegy" as a memorial to Miyako Umehara, the wife of his friend, the philosopher Takeshi Umehara. The piece was first performed at the funeral ceremony by Himari Umehara, the daughter of the deceased. Hosokawa has in his music repeatedly made reference to specific historical events and their existential repercussions. "Threnody" is dedicated to the victims of the Tohoku earthquake and the ensuing devastating tsunami on 11 March 2011, which claimed more than 20,000 lives.

Although the Symphony and the Requiem appear to be fundamentally different in concept and in the resulting treatment of the musical material, they do have an important point in common. This is the focus of the composer's aesthetic creed which recalls Byzantian thinking: a musical statement always contains it's opposite. It is a whole which includes and unites singularity and multiplicity. It is "this-as-well-as-that", yet at the same time "ne-utral" (in the original sense of "neither-this nor-that"). In the end it neutralizes it's musical precondition, it's relation to tradition, distancing itself from tradition, and becoming in it's way an original phenomenon. Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin / Peter G�lke: conductor / Maria Bayo: soprano / Iris Vermillion: mezzo soprano / Victor von Halem: bass / Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg / Staatlich Akademischer Chor Riga / Imants Cepitis: chorus master / Gerd Albrecht: conductor.

Paul Hindemith's compositions for a cappella choir are distinguished by a richness of expression and mood manifested in various compositional techniques and artistic forms. Again and again in his writings and textbooks, Hindemith emphasized the important role of the singing voice as a natural instrument for the composer-in-the-making to test his compositional sketches as well as for the layperson and music lover for spontaneous singing and music making. The CD presents choral compositions on texts by Bertolt Brecht, Gottfried Benn, Walt Whitman, Fitz-James O'Brien, medieval and self-composed texts. Both dramatic and humorous, light tones in these choral works show the breadth of Hindemith's skillfulness. The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award and the "Echo Klassik 2001" (best choral-work recording)!

"Sulam" is the Hebrew word for the ladder connecting heaven and earth that appeared to Jacob, the patriarch of Israel, in a dream. Rabbi Ashlag's magnum opus of Jewish mysticism is also called "Sulam", but the word also refers simply to a musical scale. For the musicians around the clarinetist Moshe Berlin, giving this name to their band was a way of setting a program for their style of klezmer: combining dream and reality, heaven and earth, the hidden and the revealed. The recordings for this CD stem from a concert in the Berlin House of the Cultures of the World in 1990 when the ensemble came to Germany for the first time.

Besides various intangible elements - a balance of physical and metaphysical properties of Saed Haddad "good music" needs. The former he counts beauty, power, magic, power, virtuosity, etc.; in the second category are elusive concepts: the existential, the spiritual and the transcendental. The works on this CD come from two different marked by compositional practice periods. In the first period from 2004 to 2006 Haddad sought a synthesis of Arabic and Western music - without the usual Western mesh as tourism, exoticism or some form of abstraction. The aim was a real, existential and transcendental integration, not a juxtaposition or even constraints of a tradition on the other. More recently, since 2007, prefers to always questioning composers continued increasingly from a direct, existential contact with Arab culture.

Berner Streichquartett / Schola Cantorum Stuttgart / Clytus Gottwald: conductor / Walter Grimmer: cello.

In the 1930s, Ernst Fischer became a popular radio and film composer par excellence. His exquisite orchestral scores delighted a whole generation of music-loving radio listeners, and that up to the 1960s. This CD - meant to be a first step to (re-)discover the work of Ernst Fischer - contains a small selection of Fischer's extensive oeuvre, among others his suite "S�dlich der Alpen", which Fischer became famous for, all over the world. The liner notes in the CD-booklet are presented in German.

The recordings were made at the Wiesbaden Marktkirche. The basilica with five towers was built by the architect Carl Boos as 'Nassauer Landesdom' [Cathedral of Nassau] in 1853-62. The main tower of the Marktkirche houses the carillon built by the Dutch bell foundry Koninklijke Eijsbouts in 1986 in a height of ca. 70 metres. The carillon with 49 bronze bells has a weight of 21 tons and is played from a manual lever keyboard. It is only on such a keyboard that dynamically differentiated playing is possible which makes melodies become apparent through different striking techniques and the spectrum of which ranges from powerful sound cascades to a softly fading pianissimo. Built by E. F. Walcker & Cie. in 1863 and later altered and extended several times, the organ consists of 85 stops over four manuals and pedal today.

The meeting of East and West that has always characterized Georgian culture is especially strong factor in the rich variety of musical styles that range from Eastern-sounding monophony to the traditional polyphony of church music and rural popular music. The three ensembles recorded here - Soinari, Mzetamze, and Mtiebi - give broad perspective on the landscape of Georgian culture today, with a program of traditional and contemporary works that includes popular songs and music from films. The CD was awarded the Quarterly German Record Critics' Award!

The members of the Singphoniker met in 1980 while they were students and members of the chorus at the Munich "Hochschule". Their first appearances evolved out of their classical training as singers and their common interest in jazz, the music of the 1920's, and music from the era of the Beatles. The unusual success of their performances transformed their "fun" into a lively seriousness and professional careers. Through their concert activities, and numerous radio and television presentations, the Singphoniker have become a byword with the public and the press.

Spiritual masters have emphasized again and again that meditation and the search for divine truth begin with listening. The sounds of gongs, with their indefinable and ever changing (overtone) vibrations, are especially appropriate for drawing one into unsuspected depths. Michael Vetter, who lived for years in a Zen monastery in Japan, has developed a completely unique language for gongs.

The two compositions of the pastor and professor for experimental music, Dieter Schnebel, which have already been published on LP in 1976 - which was awarded the Prize of the German Phonographic Academy - are examples for different conceptual areas, and hence for different reaction possibilities of the listeners. "Choralvorspiele" realize as the instrumental counterpart to Schnebel's choir pieces "Missa est" the most general ensemble instructions imaginable. The composition does not close the door of the church to any sound phenomenon, but it fetches into the interior of the church everything that sounds and produces noise. "Atemzuge", basic course of "Maulwerke" for several articulating organs and reproduction devices from the open work group "Produktionsprozesse", could stimulate independent production by the listener himself as musical reflections on the "language" of the own vital process and its manifestations. This CD was awarded the German Record-Award (German Phono-Academy). coproduction with Hessischer Rundfunk and Westdeutscher Rundfunk

This Wergo recording features two of Sofia Gubaidulina's works from the late 1970s/early 1980s that see her establishing a mature style after years of journeyman efforts. The titles of the works point to the Russian composer's deep religious belief, and while there is no text in these purely instrumental works, the spirit of contemplation and wrestling with spiritual questions persists throughout. The pieces are centered around cello and accordion, played here by Julius Berger and Stefan Hussong respectively. "In Croce" was originally written in 1979 as a piece for organ and cello, but it is represented here in a 1991 arrangement for cello and accordion by Elsbeth Moser which Gubaidulina has approved. As it's title suggests, this is an exploration of "vertical" music (the organ or accordion) intersected by the "horizontal" (cello). The work is a steady slow of eerie chords from the accordion with the sinuous, yearning voice of the cello threading through them. While the first half of the work offers a feeling of stasis with the occasional outburst, the second half offers a suspenseful, gradually rising development. The work draws to a close with the cello playing harmonics by which the music seems to evaporate. The Kammerorchester Diagonal conducted by Florian Rosensteiner joins in for the next piece. "Sieben Worte (Seven Words)" for cello, bayan, and strings is a depiction of Jesus' death on the cross in the venerable classical tradition started by Heinrich Sch�tz (whom Gubaidulina subtly quotes at one point). Gubaidulina was attracted to writing for the accordion because it has a very living quality to it, it "breathes", and here the instrument depicts the gradual dying of breath. This is one of Gubaidulina's best pieces, the seven movements offering a variety of textures - even a tragic subject like the crucifixion can still be painted in many shares.